Where Frustration Rides Bumper To Bumper

As she leaves work, trudging toward the parking lot and the daily rush- hour drive on Interstate 4, Carolyn Moyer bids co-workers goodbye with soft, motherly tones -- the kind that murmur through commercials where some mom, Donna Reed-like, says button up because it's cold season.

Moyer, indeed, is the mother of three, and to keep her mood as calm as her voice, she switches her car radio to some easy-listening music as she enters the I-4 fray and wends her way home to Altamonte Springs, where rosebushes await her gardening.

For six years, the mixture of soft music, soil and maternal outlook seemed to soothe. Moyer stayed serene, driving to and from her secretarial job at Martin Marietta in south Orlando without delivering even a mean honk. But like many Central Florida commuters, caught inside an ever-tightening gridlock in an ever-growing community, the traffic jams slowly took their toll.

Last July in 90-degree heat, on the interstate that topped its desired traffic load 10 years ago, it finally happened. She lighted up like a road flare.

Trying to beat the traffic, Moyer dashed from her office through the hot humidity into her car. The front seat scorched her. She started sweating. But there was no time to wait for the seat to cool. If she didn't go right away, the 20-mile trip could stretch into an 80-minute wait. And she had already figured she was spending 40 hours a month commuting.

Traffic was grinding forward, slow as usual. But around the Church Street exit it stacked up bumper-to-bumper, brake and gas, stop and start. The smell of boiling radiators filled the air.

Then, just as she was gaining a little speed, some punk cut her off. Just swung over into her lane. Who do these people think they are?

Moyer, 52, stomped on the gas. She passed cars, pulled even with the young woman who committed the lane crossing, rolled down the window and let her have it in a manner most unmotherly.

''Hey!'' she screamed. ''Learn how to drive!''

Donna Reed had vanished. The Road Warrior was at the wheel.

Seething because the young woman pretended to ignore her, Moyer gave pursuit, pulled her Camaro even with the car and repeated her advice about remedial driver's education. Then she commented on ''a few other choice things'' while the startled driver pulled away.

Still angry that the young woman had not felt the raw edge of her rage, Moyer started to chase her a third time. But a glance at the speedometer snapped her back to her senses. She eased off the gas, feeling slightly sheepish, yet somehow justified.

''Everything's fair on I-4,'' she said. ''It makes sinners out of saints.'' She can laugh now, but Moyer is not alone in flailing against the tides of traffic that can transform a defensive driver into a maddened motorist.

And if, as psychologists say, highway crowding provokes the anger that builds slowly and erupts unpredictably, then the ranks of Mad Maxes and Mad Moyers will likely swell as Central Florida continues to grow and the lines of automobiles stretch farther back on the highway, now two decades old.

Interstate 4's route through downtown Orlando opened on Feb. 25, 1965, at 2 p.m. By 4:50 p.m., a truck had smacked into the rear of a car, giving the highway its first accident, and presumably its first rush-hour traffic jam -- a tradition that continues 22 years later.

Planners liken I-4 to a small pipeline in an ocean of traffic. No matter how wide they build it, there's a surplus of ocean waiting to get in.

''You can only shove so much water into the pipe,'' said Dave Grovdahl, transportation planner with the East Central Florida Regional Planning Council. And the I-4 pipe already was filled 10 years ago.

Back then, when 75,000 vehicles a day was the desirable level of traffic, almost 90,000 motorists were passing by the Par Avenue exit just north of downtown Orlando. In 1984, the traffic flow at Lee Road, a little farther north, was up to 117,000.

And with Central Florida's swelling population -- metro Orlando has grown 28 percent to 898,000 since 1980 -- the sea of commuters is not likely to recede.

Studies have shown that even if it were possible to turn I-4's six-lane slab through Orlando into an eight-lane road, the solution would be worse than the problem. An eight-lane highway, Grovdahl said, would have a desired capacity of only 100,000 while the current estimated load at the Lee Road exit is already 134,000 commuters a day.

Not only that, but computer models predict that an eight-lane I-4 would draw enough motorists to require a 12-lane road, which is a physical -- if not a financial -- impossibility.

''Adding a lane to I-4 attracts more traffic,'' Grovdahl said. ''You bring the people back who were diverted off onto the alternate routes. You just pack them in tighter until you reach the top of the sardine can.''